Primary Factors Taxing Your Computer’s Performance

The integral parts of a computer system play a major role in making up its operational speed. There is a host of things that contribute to or impact the speed of your computer, i.e. CPU clock, memory speed, and hard drive rotation. The impact of the hard drive may be significant over time, but this does not imply that it is the only reason behind performance lag. Let us dive deeper into the problem:

Hard Drive Speed

One of the major hurdles in the smooth operation of a computer is the hard drive. You can achieve a performance bump by having CPUs with multiple cores and large volumes of cheap memory. However, before these allow your memory to communicate at light-fastening speeds, your system needs to access the hard drive for pulling programs and data. The performance of a hard drive is limited by the spinning speed of its magnetic platters. Though some drives are available with a speed of 15,000 RPM, most of the consumers prefer 5400 RPM or 7200 RPM drives.

Hard Drive Capacity

When the operating system runs out of memory, it makes use of a small portion of your hard drive’s space as the temporary cache to keep necessary files. In case there is less free space available on the hard drive, the OS will not be able to utilize the hard drive, and hence causes slowdown.

Browser Cache

Your browser cache contributes to Internet speed. It contains all the pages and other data downloaded from the Internet. This data rarely changes and thus, you do not require surfing the web when viewing these pages later. Your browser calls up these files locally and saves a considerable amount of bandwidth for other operations. If you have a low-capacity hard drive, you will require clearing out this cache regularly. This would increase the loading time for various websites. Further, if your hard drive is slow, the browser cannot pull data from it at the same speed.

Solid State Drives

This is a good alternative to the mechanical hard disk drives. Solid-state drives do not include mechanical patterns and use flash memory technology to read/write data. This makes them much faster than their mechanical spinning counterparts. However, SSD is a relatively new technology and is expensive. On the other hand, HDDs provide a good amount of storage for a reasonable cost.